Step inside Amazon's corporate palace

WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for 15 January

Your WIRED.co.uk daily briefing. Today, the United States will have draft national regulations for autonomous vehicles within six months, the most powerful supernova ever studied could rewrite our model of how stars explode, Netflix clamps down on users watching content from outside their geographic region and more.

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How to design an office to maximise productivity

ByTim Hulse

United States Secretary of Transport Anthony Foxx has given his country's Department of Transportation six months to draft national rules for the testing and regulation of self-driving cars (WIRED). There's also money going into the automation effort, with $4 billion earmarked for pilot test programs for autonomous vehicles. Carmakers are likely to welcome the move, which will ensure consistent legislation across the country, rather than on a state-by-state basis, and may even serve as a blueprint for regulations elsewhere in the world.

Astronomers have published findings which show supernova ASASSN-15lh to be the most powerful ever studied (Nature). Subo Dong of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in Beijing said that the supernova, which burned brighter than 570 billion Suns when it reached peak luminosity, "challenges all our previous theories of explosion mechanisms and power sources of superluminous supernovae." ASASSN-15lh is among a class of low-hydrogen supernovae, their explosions powered by magnetars, the fast-spinning cores of stars that have thrown off their outer layer, but the model may need to be reconsidered as the levels of heat and brightness seen appear to require an impossible 100 percent conversation of spin energy into heat.

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Bill Gates just gave a whopping $4.6bn to charity

Netflix has announced that it will be taking extra measures to prevent people from viewing its service via "unblockers" -- proxies and VPNs that mask a user's location and allow them to view content intended for another geographic region (Ars Technica). The move is intended to appease licence holders such as Sony and abide by what Content Delivery Architecture VP David Fullagar described as "the historic practice of licensing content by geographic territories". While Netflix clearly hopes to eventually license all properties for simultaneous broadcast in all territories, the company admits that, for now, its crack-down will also affect people who use VPN and third-party DNS services for security or performance reasons.

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A love letter (of sorts) to LoveFilm

ByJames Temperton

Astronauts Time Peake of the UK and Tim Kopra, from the USA, will be venturing outside the International Space Station to replace a malfunctioning part on the space station's exterior (Space.com). The spacewalk will be the first by a British astronaut and Nasa will be video streaming the whole thing live, starting at 11:30 GMT. The pair are scheduled to head outside at 12:55 GMT, but may set out early if they take less time than expected to get ready.

Amazon's Chinese subsidiary has registered for an ocean freight licence with the USA's Federal Maritime Commission (Motherboard). The licence would explicitly allow it to ship products for other companies, but logistics experts speculate that it would allow Amazon to cheaply and directly buy products in China and sell them itself in the USA. Amazon also appears to have been quietly setting up its own international air freight operation in recent months.

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How to start a side project (or five)

ByVictoria Turk

3 items

Documents filed this week show that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has donated 290,000 shares of Facebook stock -- worth around $31 million -- to charity (Re/Code). All this happens via the Sheryl Sandberg Philanthropy Fund, a 'donor-advised' fund run by US financial giant Fidelity, which controls the stock on her behalf but allows her to direct where it goes. Most of the money will be going to women's empowerment groups, including Sandberg's own Lean In nonprofit, as well as education and anti-poverty charities. Like Mark Zuckerberg, Sandberg has pledged to devote most of her wealth to philanthropy, but it's worth noting that charitable funds of this sort also bring tax benefits.

Radiocarbon dating of a butchered mammoth carcass has shown that humans were living and hunting in the Arctic 45,000 years ago (Science). The mammoth carcass, discovered in 2011 by an 11-year-old boy in Russia's frigid Yenisei Bay, 2,000km south of the North Pole, showed clear signs that it was killed by humans. The mammoth, named Zhenya after its discoverer, had injuries from stone weapons that the investigation's lead author Vladimir Pitulko describes as “a rare case for unequivocal evidence for clear human involvement".

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How Instagram conquered social media

ByVictoria Turk

Nasa has announced that Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser launch vehicle, due to enter service in 2019, will be the third commercial company commissioned to supply the International Space Station, alongside SpaceX and Orbital ATK (PopSci). The Dream Chaser is a reusable Space Shuttle-like vehicle, able to make a soft landing. This makes it ideal for collecting cargo for a return journey from the ISS, which Sierra Nevada says will take three to six hours.

Chinese search giant Baidu has made some of its key machine-learning code open source (MIT Technology Review). The Warp-CTC code is designed for deep learning, allowing computer systems to associate, for example, a spoken word with an image or a series of written characters. Baidu recently used the system to build its Deep Speech 2 speech recognition engine, which has been found to recognise short sentences more effectively than a human.

US sports news and broadcasting giant ESPN has finally recognised eSports with a new section of its site dedicated to providing fans with "video, news on the current and future state of esports, offseason grades that look back on the past season of multiple league championships from around the world and profiles on gamers who have influenced the meteoric rise of esports" (TheNextWeb). It's a turnaround for a company whose president John Skipper said in 2014 that esports is "not a sport, it’s a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition. Mostly I’m interested in doing real sports."

Drone killing -- stopping rogue drones that could be equipped with explosives -- will be a big business. Boeing has already developed a laser to shoot drones out of the sky but there may be an easy solution: the humble net. Mechanical engineers from Michigan Tech University hooked a giant net up to a drone and created a system where it flings the net over another drone and carries it away.

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